Spam is out of control...

[Toefur]

I have a few hundred email filters on, but I keep getting more and more spam. No matter how many filters... I get at least 30 spam mails per day, and I put more filters on for each piece of spam (when I can, without potentially blocking legit stuff).

I never show my email address anyway.

I'm sick to death of this.

Is there anything I can do?

I thought of just closing my current email accounts, and starting a new one, but I think that would be just too inconvenient.

[Jan]

Unfortunately the spambots did their work some time back and sell to new buyers all the time. They are getting smarter (and sicker) with their subject field. But for the "$49 for 10,000,000 targeted email adresses" There is always a few suckers that will signup for their scams that will pay for their initial outlay, they then sell to other parties and so the cycle continues.....very sick people in this world :confused2

[CareBear]

you really need to be consistent and firm. It's not that difficult with current email programs to check more then one address at a time so get a different one for your site no matter how much you think you've hidden it (javascript, ascii code, gif, etc).
If you ever use your real email address to sign up for a service/message board/online store etc you're "doomed". Even Amazon "sold" my email address and I know for sure it was them because I had created an amazon@ alias on my domain.
Most companies have a "we won't sell/give out your email address but we will share it with a select number of companies that we're associated with" clause in their privacy policy and while the company you're signing up with might be privacy conscious you can't assume their partners will be.
Another instant way to get on spam lists is if you have people that are in the habit of forwarding e-mails with dozens of e-mails in the To or Cc field or that just forward e-mails without removing previous To/Cc addresses. The only real thing you can do is try to educate them and tell them to either send mails individually or to start using the Bcc field. I've told several people I'd just stop communicating with them if they insisted on sending me e-mails like that and eventually some of them got the point or others just took me out of the forwarding list.
All my personal email accounts are clear of any kind of spam and always have been so I must be doing something right :)

(Oh and don't use free email providers as your primary email. You run the high risk of them selling their e-mail address as a means to get more money for themselves or that you pick an email someone else used to signup for 1000 spam lists before or just people who'll type in a random address. I've been guilty of that too.. @dontask.com or @somewhere.com is usually an address I try first to see if I can go without putting a real one :o )

[byrdgirl13]

Do you have a filter that dumps mail with your own alias in the from or subject fields? Example, me@domain.com you would set up so if the email you get has "me" as the name or address of who it's from OR the subject line, it gets sorted out as junk. I did that (well since my alias is byrdgirl13, I filter out "byrd" - that sorts out all the other weird names spammers make with byrd in them), and the folder I send those mails to hasn't got a single real email. All spam.

[Todd]

If you haven't already given it a try I'd suggest a program that uses Bayesian analysis such as: http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

I have it handle a couple of my mailboxes and after the initial training it becomes well over 95% effective at capturing all spam with nearly zero false positives. It takes a while to build an effective word database so it's accuracy is effective but once that's done the spammers will have a much more difficult time getting an email in front of you.